I've got a machine that I've left running "for the cause" for the past week or so since I found out about bitcoins. Even though I'm skeptical of a few of the monetary policy claims behind the currency, I think an extra-governmental digital currency is in and of itself a positive thing, so I'm willing to run my machine more than usual to help out with the network. I've got two questions regarding CPU consumption, which stem from the fact that my machine is a speed-stepping laptop.

1)I understand that 21,000,000 coins is the maximum. How many total blocks will this be, given the logarithmic decrease of coins/block when we hit the 21M?

2)After all the blocks are minted, the network, as I understand it, will be responsible for validating transactions, and will receive occasional transaction fees as an incentive for running the system. Currently, generating coins guzzles CPU cycles, but I can see no reason why the much faster transaction processing won't be far more lax on the CPU, as it won't involve literally constant crypto work. Am I right or wrong here?

2)After all the blocks are minted, the network, as I understand it, will be responsible for validating transactions, and will receive occasional transaction fees as an incentive for running the system. Currently, generating coins guzzles CPU cycles, but I can see no reason why the much faster transaction processing won't be far more lax on the CPU, as it won't involve literally constant crypto work. Am I right or wrong here?

You still need to generate blocks (and do all the hashing etc) for transaction processing - the proof-of-work is what prevents an attacker from producing a very convincing block chain with transactions cleverly rearranged to undo his payment.

1)I understand that 21,000,000 coins is the maximum. How many total blocks will this be, given the logarithmic decrease of coins/block when we hit the 21M?

Somewhere around block 5,355,000 (this will be sometime around 2111 at 6 blocks an hour.)I expect many things will have changed by then though.

Interesting, I could still be alive then. *gramps sitting in rocking chair* "I remember back in the old days when we didn't have 200 core computers in our cell phones to create these blocks" to which the great-great-great grand kids reply "Yeah, he's loony; everyone knows there is no such thing as a single core computer...."